Publisher's Synopsis
This is part of a series which brings together writers and artists from Europe and America who complement and illuminate each other's work. "The Other Monographs" is an occasional series of art books that integrate text and reproductions in a large, one-volume format.;In "Alex Katz: Echoes" a French novelist and a Mexican novelist collaborate on a text built around the work of a major American artist. At the opening of an exhibition of Katz's work, the authors eavesdrop on the commentary around them. What they hear from the various denizens and hangers-on of the art world plunges them into a discussion of the artist's work. Their dialogue becomes a critical examination of Katz's aims and methods as a painter: his continuing to work as a figurative artist in the fifties and sixties at a time when abstraction was de rigueur; his awareness and manipulation of the past; and his ideas about the uses of the painter's two traditional dimensions, in both his paintings and cutouts, in a way that was perhaps more nuanced than that of the abstractionists.;Over 120 color plates reproduce paintings, cutouts, and drawings from the 1950s to the present.;Since the late 1950s, Alex Katz has been one of the preeminent figures in American contemporary art. Known for his portraits, he is also celebrated for his pioneering use of cutouts and for his mastery of the print media.
